The Active CroCubeSat Project: Design and Status

Under the NASA Small Spacecraft Technology Program, the Center for Space Engineering at Utah State University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are jointly developing an active thermal control system to better enable cryogenic instrumentation on a CubeSat. The Active CryoCubeSat (ACCS) project is a two staged thermal architecture targeting 6U CubeSat platforms. The second stage consists of a miniature cryocooler for sub 100 K detector thermal management, while the first stage consists of a single phase Mechanically Pumped Fluid Loop that circulates a moderate temperature coolant between the cryocooler’s cold plate heat exchanger (HX) and a radiator. As part of the investigation, two novel additive manufacturing techniques, Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) and Ultrasonic Additive Manufacturing (UAM), were also explored for the purpose of rapidly fabricating compact and lightweight liquid HX and radiator plates. Instruments such as SABER on the NASA TIMED mission have used pulse tube cryocoolers to support multispectral scanning of the earth’s atmospheric limb at infrared wavelengths. Such measurements require high radiometric sensitivity and can only be accomplished by cryogenically cooled detectors. The ACCS project hopes to enable similar CubeSat based missions such as the SABER-Lite miniature far-IR limb viewer. A summary and status of the project will be presented